The detailed description in "Quentin Durward" is, however, as good as any, and, if one has no reference works in French by him, he may well read the dozen or more pages which Sir Walter devotes to the further description of the castle.
Perhaps, after all, it is fitting that a Scot should have written so enthusiastically of it, for the castle itself was guarded by the Scottish archers, "to the number of three hundred gentlemen of the best blood of Scotland."
An anonymous poet has written of the ancient glory of this retreat of Louis's as follows:
"Un imposant château se présente à la vue,
Par des portes de fer l'entrée est défendue;
Les murs en sont épais et les fossés profonds;
On y voit des créneaux, des tours, des bastions,
Et des soldats armés veillent sur ses murailles."
Frame this with such details as the surrounding country supplies, the Cher on one side, the Loire on the other, and the fertile hills of St. Cyr, of Ballon, and of Joué, and one has a picture worthy of the greatest painter of any time.
Louis XI. died at Plessis, after having lived there many years. Louis XII. made of it a rendezvous de chasse, but François II. confided its care to a governor and would never live in it. Louis XIV. gave the governorship as a hereditary perquisite to the widow of the Seigneur de Sausac.
In 1778 it was used as a sort of retreat for the indigent, though happily enough Touraine was never overburdened with this class of humanity. Under Louis XV. a Mademoiselle Deneux, a momentary rival of La Pompadour and Du Barry, found a retreat here. Later it became a maison de correction, and finally a dépôt militaire. At the time of the Revolution it was declared to be national property, and on the nineteenth Nivoise, Year IV., Citizen Cormeri, justice of the peace at Tours, fixed its value at one hundred and thirty-one thousand francs.
To-day it is as bare and uncouth as a mere barracks or as a disused flour-mill, and its ruins are visited partly because of their former historical glories, as recalled by students of French history, and partly because of the glamour which was shed over it, for English readers, by Scott.
Sixty years ago a French writer deplored the fact that, on leaving these scanty remains of a so long gone past, he observed a notice nailed to a pillar of the porte-cochère reading:
LA FERME DU PLESSIS